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B&G Simrad 60 2012


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Well done everyone who raced today. I was having fun just watching you all smoke to the finish and would have loved to have been out there in something that isnt flipable.

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That was hard work, making the 7.4m caravan go to Gannet was somewhat time-consuming. There was some discussion as to whether to go MH chute for the run down to Rakino but I made the call to go fractional which turned out to be a good one....as there would definitely have been tears as we went through between haystack and Rakino fair cranking and a lot on!

 

Decided to drop and rehoist instead of gybe in a fair bit of puff and ended in a tangle that was a good thing because it was time to put the kites away and 2-sail to the finish.

 

Good fun but hard work, thanks again SSANZ.

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that kite ride gave me a chubby. boat musta heard us talking about what the next boat could be so pulled its finger out of is arse and had a good race. made the right calls out of the start, sailed well up the waiheke shore, put a kite up at gannet and went balls to the wall as a warm up to pushing your balls through the wall, out the other side and back into your sack after darting round the world. it felt slow planning for consistant bursts of 20 seconds by the time we went down the back of rangi. YEEHAA. surfing, overtaking waves when we could, stopped a few times and slid forwards in out seats which stretched the backstay we think.....block to block and the thing near hangs loose now. anyway it was the fastest iv been in a boat other than the force 11. go the mighty QUARTER PINT, fuggen digs a hole though. snuck up the little genniker to the finish and stretched our legs on the piedy....got cocky and gybed after the finish, not the best one but had a nice little slide down the harbour, may have been speeding.

 

picking top speed around 16/17 maybe. wasn't looking, too busy keeping poor lil boat on its feet. our slow bits were 13

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I am seriously getting effing jealous right now!

 

Loving hearing these stories! need some photos though! so who recorded the top speed of the day? any one break anything major?

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saw crocodile fall over behind us. bloody good effort too. i looked when their mast was 1m above the water on its way up.

 

 

edit. might not have been crocodile fall over behind us. blue frac kite with a white main, white hull, looked light weight and was going like sh!t off a shovel at times.

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What a great day for a sail.

 

We had an up and down day on Candela. Took us almost half the beat to Gannet to get the boat going but after that made good ground on a few people. I think we were second or third around in our division.

 

Made a bad call at Gannet and put the gennaker up when we should have chooses the kite and paid the price for that. Once we got the kite up had a great run to Rakino with Dolphins playing beside us most of the way.

 

Once around around Rakino we were flat running with your bigger kite up feeling really good till we fell over. Recovered from that in reasonable time but with a very sad kite. Decided to put the small kite up and had a great ride. A new record for Candela 13 knots. Not bad for an old heavy boat.

 

Dropped the kite at about Rangi light and 2 sail reached to the finish.

 

I really hope there is no photos of us destroying our kite :)

 

Thanks to SSANZ for another great race!!!!!

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Was both an extremely special day aboard Timberwolf but also bitterly disappointing.

 

We were always struggling for height in the bobble upwind but had great speed through the water. Sailing out to Gannet we had a number of lead changes with Taeping and also one with Borderline.

We got much of the beat right but a couple of sloppy tacks were quite costly.

We had accounted for most of the Monohulls and rounded Gannet behind Taeping (a couple of minutes?) also XL, Wired and Equilibrium.

The leg from Gannet to Flat was at 90 degrees true and from 18 to 25 knots.

We had Full main and self tacker on and it was the right combination.

Mostly our speed stayed close to 20 knots as going faster was difficult in the waves.

Most of this leg we were slowly losing Taeping.

Until near Flat Rock they appeared to be underlaying and we were catching nicely.

 

BANG!

Anyone who knows the boat will know it was the Port Rudder getting ripped off the stern.

It is the worst design of my life and it is no one's fault but my own. This is the 3rd time it has happened and is caused by the gudgeons not being properly attached to the hull structure inside the stern and around the back.

It is very easy to fix and it will not happen again.

 

Anyway then we find ourselves close to Flat Rock and decide we can probably carry on.

Certainly most of the rest of the race is going to be on Port and we don't need a Port Rudder for that.

In fact the less drag will actually be faster. See later in the story.

The Dodgy part though is gybing in big waves when both sterns like to lift out of the water.

We gybed as best we could at Flat Rock and hoisted the Masthead Gennaker. We were on Port and decided to soak very low to limit our time on Starboard.

We were chugging along at about 12 knots but extended nicely from Wired and were catching Taeping.

The gybe onto Starboard went well. Everytime the stern lifts out so does the windward rudder and if the sail trim isn't perfect it either starts to Round up or bear away. We sailed at 160 degrees true with the main eased right out.

It wasn't particularly fast but we knew once we got to the bottom of Motuora we would be on Port for the rest of the race.

By the end of the leg I was very chuffed to have made it. ( I should mention it was MacGyver-ish)

 

The leg from Motuora to Tiri we were just flying, solidly over 20 knots and short bursts over 25. We had gone close to both Motuora and Whangaparoa and made a nice (but small) gain on Taeping.

The breeze was 80 degrees true and in the puffs (up to 28 knots) we seemed to be going very well.

However there were still some lighter spots where Taeping seemed to stretch out abit.

 

Through the passage and towards Rangi Light the waves were pretty huge and some you could surf on but some were tripping us up pretty bad. We stuffed in a few times but also hit just on 29 knots down a massive wave face.

 

We also a very scary near miss with Focus the Elliot 1350.

Peanut was on the back taking pics as we closed in on them. Ever ther show off I pointed the boat straight at them and we hit over 28 knots on the top of a wave as we were still going at them.

Just as my rudder hit the quarter wave of Focus it decided to let go and Timberwolf bore away pretty hard.

We had to dump a bit of sail and wait for the rudder to bite again to get back on course.

I was close to shitting myself but it was just too much fun.

Very sorry to Peanut and Matty if we gave you a fright there !

 

Despite some good bursts however we were also getting stopped back to 16 to 18 knots in some waves and Taeping had the legs on us in those conditions and went on to win by nearly 6 minutes.

 

Near Takapuna where the swells had become less confused we did fulfill a dream i have had since the remodel of the boat.

This is the first time the boat has been out in 25-30 knots of breeze with decent swells to catch.

 

Our new Top speed is 30.86 knots.

An unbelievable squirt of speed, not totally in control, but just so fantastic. Also rudder not quite up to that speed (cavitates a bit).

 

Also a huge high to see we were first on handicap in the multis and according to Racetrack first on that as well.

 

However we had a gilt edged opportunity to beat Taeping (as we certainly lost more than 5 minutes when we lost the rudder) so there is real disappointment about that.

 

Most definitely the best SSANZ race I've ever done.

Thank you very much to the Boat crews and volunteers and all the photographers out there.

 

photo (2).JPG

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That was exciting reading Tim... what a day that woulda been!!

 

We had accounted for most of the Monohulls and rounded Gannet behind Taeping (a couple of minutes?) also XL, Wired and Equilibrium.

I had read elsewhere that XL had withdrawn? ...did they withdraw their withdrawl?

 

We were chugging along at about 12 knots...

lol... only on a multi.

 

Timberwolf report: "We were chugging along at about 12 knots..."

 

Hanse Off report: "We were flying along and almost hit 12 knots!"

 

 

Our new Top speed is 30.86 knots.

Wow!

Somebody was asking for the tops speed recorded for the day. I daresay that could be it?

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Saw what would have been a fantastic sequence up against Rangi shore on the way in - unfortunately no camera but I could imagine the commentary from 500m away as they set up for a gennaker hoist for the last squirt into the finish:

 

Foredeck: Gennaker's clipped on, you can sneak the tack out to the prod

Helm: Careful, it's starting to blow out of the bag a bit - actually a lot

Foredeck: It's OK, we'll hoist it out of midair before it catches in the p...

Helm: #$%&

Foredeck: #$%&

 

One very quick dead stop but a tidy recovery through the transom and hopefully a decent haul of seafood in that one. :thumbup:

 

Yes I think it may have been someone from this site. :shh:

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Saw what would have been a fantastic sequence up against Rangi shore on the way in - unfortunately no camera but I could imagine the commentary from 500m away as they set up for a gennaker hoist for the last squirt into the finish:

 

Foredeck: Gennaker's clipped on, you can sneak the tack out to the prod

Helm: Careful, it's starting to blow out of the bag a bit - actually a lot

Foredeck: It's OK, we'll hoist it out of midair before it catches in the p...

Helm: #$%&

Foredeck: #$%&

 

One very quick dead stop but a tidy recovery through the transom and hopefully a decent haul of seafood in that one. :thumbup:

 

Yes I think it may have been someone from this site. :shh:

 

Did the Ogre go fishing again?

 

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Saw what would have been a fantastic sequence up against Rangi shore on the way in - unfortunately no camera but I could imagine the commentary from 500m away as they set up for a gennaker hoist for the last squirt into the finish:

 

Foredeck: Gennaker's clipped on, you can sneak the tack out to the prod

Helm: Careful, it's starting to blow out of the bag a bit - actually a lot

Foredeck: It's OK, we'll hoist it out of midair before it catches in the p...

Helm: #$%&

Foredeck: #$%&

 

One very quick dead stop but a tidy recovery through the transom and hopefully a decent haul of seafood in that one. :thumbup:

 

Yes I think it may have been someone from this site. :shh:

 

Ah snap. think that may have been me? Hackline jammer released with chute half up. Handbrake corner coming up! Bugger. Not our finest work.

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Heres the video of Timber Wolf coming past us on Focus.

 

 

We are doing 10-12 knots so you can see they are going pretty quick!

 

We had a great race, first in our divison(cruising) to Gannet while passing lots of long haul division boats.

Then an easy reach / reach home and tidied up before the rain.

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Great race review Tim, and enjoyed the vid. Just dialling the thrills back a bit - we had a good race on Norseman II, the wind wasn't as strong as expected for much of the first beat, but finally had to put the no.1 away before Thumb Point, did a nice change to no.2 but were still a bit adrift from the faster small boats at Gannet. The run down to Rakino was fun, dolphin escort (and set off the depth sounder alarm), the wind was increasing all the way down and had some good waves down past Rakino - elected not to gybe with the kite up, so dropped that, gybed and then set the gennaker for the run to Rangi light and up the channel, hoping we could carry it a fair way up, if not to the finish. Had a blast to Rangi light, a lot of humming and vibrating as we surfed some waves up to 12kn (that's 'sending it' in a Tracker!). We managed to carry the gennaker all the way to the finish but it was a close thing around North Head as we'd had to give up a bit of windward ground with a ship coming out (see gps track). But glad that we were able to carry it as it gave us a good finishing time, allowing us to stay ahead of Aquaholic who carried their kite all the way though, and to pass China Doll who had done a number on us to Gannet.

 

Thanks SSANZ, another great day's racing!

SSANZ Race 2 finish_1.pdf

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This is going in the next Reactor Association magazine..

 

 

From Thrills to Spills...

 

Saint Fintan started race two in good shape, looking to build on the 3rd place in the first race. Lots of upwind work was in the offing for a long haul to Gannet. A reasonable start and we were to weather and ahead of the other Reactors and some of the Trackers in our combined fleet.

 

Tacks into the Rangi shore seemed to pay off so we tried that, and seemed to be holding our own well enough. Through Motuihe passage and time for a plan, which way do we go? The boats inshore and short tacking seemed to be doing well. But so did China Doll sailing straight into the tide, he did not seem to be losing much... hmm.

 

After swapping Tacks with Comfortably Numb, we ended up in drag race with them to Windward and trying to creep up, we looked to be higher and bit faster so we soldiered on, and they soon fell away and tacked out towards Waiheke, we followed to cover, Wishbone seemed a fair distance back. We could see China Doll merrily sailing north. Had Alan persuaded Phil to go to Fiji?

As we tacked towards Waiheke, We saw Wishbone follow China Doll, maybe Trish was going on holiday with Alan and Phil? Nobody invited us.

 

Anyway we were tacking towards Gannet, Comfortably Numb was going inshore, and we elected to stay out and did loosely cover them. We were pulling away from them on every board. Lovely. Hang on; who is that caning it to windward of us. Oh Dear it looks like Trish forgot her Bikini and so canned the Fiji trip and was back racing – and flying past us. Hmm not flash, so what to do? Wishbone headed inshore a bit, we elected to stay out further and put a loose cover on them on the basis that we didn’t think inshore was the way to go now, but we didn’t completely want to lose touch. Sure enough on their board out to Gannet we looked to have made quite a bit of ground and crossed in front tacking to weather and approaching Gannet looking forward to the Downhill bits.

 

Around we went, kite up in reasonably quick time and wheee off we went. Big rollers pushing us along, breeze in the 20s and it looked like Rakino was not far away at all. Approaching Rakino, we hit 8.9Kts on the GPS in the venerable Reactor, and that’s close enough to 9, so we will call it Nine Knots thank you.

 

Lots of gusts hit us approaching Rakino and we rounded up a few time but managed to get back up. Heading dead downwind in the gusts is a great idea when Rakino is not dead down wind. But whoops, Chinese Gybe. Crash and here comes the wild boom again. Crash. Wee we are still o.k. but a bit closer to Rakino I see, when we get to our feet.

 

Ok, we are still in good shape. Then Massive gust, I see 30 something on the wind gear as the boat lays over, Boom swings through, BANG. Then back again, BANG. I see the kite across the top of the sea, saturating, but still inflated. The boat right over and something does not feel right. Oh yeah, that’s not too flash, the mainsheet block has become separated from the traveller and the weighty Garhauer gear is dancing away on the end of the mainsheet. Another Gybe and the whole lot was going to swing freely back in an arc through the cockpit and maybe connect with crew. Ouch. I saw the end of the sheet about to disappear over the side, so quickly grabbed it to pull it on hoping that with no traveller attached the hardware would just pull up, snug against the boom. “PHEW” that worked. But still, a rouge mainsheet whipping through the cockpit isn’t fun. And we were getting whipped enough already.

 

Ok, so, now we are even closer to Rakino. It really is time to sort some sh*t out. Kite down is the first priority. Nothing to do put release the halyard and pull the sheet like hell and hope it comes aboard. Failing that, it will be a matter of sheets off, throwing the halyard jammer open and letting the whole lot carry away in the breeze and recover (hopefully) later.

 

Well the pull like hell plan worked. Got it all aboard, the foredeck looks like a disaster area with the battened jib wrapped up in kit sheets, around the forestay etc , the pole is still up and sticking out to starboard, the boom is doing its own thing to port.

 

We looked like a bloody longliner.

 

Ok well this is definitely time for a main engine start. And start she did. Mark wisely checked for sheets in the water before engaging and we started to move away from Rakino.

 

Next is to secure the boom, but main down first so I went on deck, Mark popped the Halyard and we dragged it down then eased the topper and dropped the whole lot right down.

 

Wow, well we were motoring away from danger, we were ok, save a few bumps and knocks and the boat is a mess. Mark asks me to grab the Chart plotter cover from below. Now he is a tidy kind of guy, but there was me thinking we had other things to worry about before putting the cover on the plotter.

But then he said “look at the screen” - it was smashed to pieces, the block had taken it out as it blew off the traveller and pieces of the screen were in danger of falling into the cockpit.

 

So we tidied ourselves up as well as we could, we got the jib untangled and hoisted to steady us and provide some more oomph.

 

Then calming ale was called for.

 

On investigation the pin that secured the block to the car on the traveller had failed. Supposedly it was stainless and about 2 years old, no sign of it in the boat, so not sure what mode of failure.

 

So we called Coastguard to update and adv we were pulling out of the race and motored home. All the more galling as we were doing so well at the time and had put quite a bit of time on the boats behind us. But that’s sailing.

 

On the plus side, it was really character building and a good test of crew work under pressure which is just as much a part of sailing as winning.

 

Well done to the other Trackers and Reactors, China Doll and Norsemen and Aquaholic all having a good race.

 

Aaron – Saint Fintan

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We managed to carry the gennaker all the way to the finish but it was a close thing around North Head as we'd had to give up a bit of windward ground with a ship coming out

 

Thanks SSANZ, another great day's racing!

 

We did the same sort of thing but we made it across the front of the ship, just. Did a bit of a fall over in front of it. Nathan was getting nervous.

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Marshall Law's report coming tomorrow. We had a wee Port-Starboard just after the start with Outlaw (Davidson 42) which gave the Marshall a nice bent and stuffed pushpit and some scratches down the topside.. At one stage I thought we were going to look like a TP52 that got speared a while back, but we both luffed just before we hit. Yes we were on starboard, yes we called and yes we both had eye contact at the time...

 

We may not be the fastest sailors out there but we know Port from Starboard, and also that the Leeward boat has right of way (another 40 footer didn't.. When you are forced to tack and then you go high to lee bow, you don't expect to hear "but you are luffing" when you ask for room).

 

Not too impressed with the knowledge of the rules out there!! Everyone seems to know how to sail faster than us though.... :( :( :(

 

Bring on the 100! More tomorrow.

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Simrad 60 on the Rattle n Rum.

We got off to an ok start mid line but quickly got rolled by the bigger boats and spent the first 15minutes trying to keep our air clear and get going. Marshy on the mercenary got the first cross on us but luckily that was to be the last time they were ahead. Slowly we found our groove and started to hold our own a bit better. Its always depressing doing upwind starts when you are one of the small boats(with the highest handicap!) in the fleet and a real downhill and light airs flyer and we knew we would have to work and hike hard to stay in touch with our division.

We worked the Rangi and Motutapu shore to avoid the tide, there wasn’t much flow but enough to make a difference. Battling it out with a bunch of Y88s, Squid vicious, bump n grind, fast company and cool change, I was pretty happy to be hanging in as we were. The only boat that had really got away from us was the Pepe who were long gone.

My original game plan was to go right, and work the Waiheke shore but with the breeze the most right(east) that I thought it would be all day, we were going to have to go across on a bad header so we opted to carry on north and wait for the breeze to shift slightly more north. This never really happened and we eventually had to tack back on an average heading. There had been a big split in the fleet with cool change, TREX and a few others splitting right as per my original gameplan and then bump n grind, us, fast company, squid vicious and a few others much further out off shore. We were happy with how we had done on the boats around us but were seriously concerned about the boats to the working the Waiheke shore. Luckily for us we got a small favourable shift to the north and managed to cross well ahead of cool change which was the lead boat out of the right hand bunch. This put us in really good shape with just Pepe, fast company and the entertainer ahead of us on the water so we just dug it in and worked as hard as we could to keep going fast. Coming into gannet rock bump n grind came in from way offshore to close the gap up quite a lot, it was quite lumpy and probably up to 20kts of wind at this stage. We just snuck ahead of the entertainer and rounded in 3rd spot with Pepe a long way ahead and just a few minutes behind fast company. I would say we were about mid fleet with the Y88s which started with us but were in another division.

We hoisted the masthead gennaker (after the entertainer graciously headed down to let us hoist-thank you) but it caught on the jib batten and tore on the luff. It was a bit tight for that sail anyway so we decided to peel to the fractional gennaker so we didn’t blow the masthead out as we might need it later. The fractional actually worked pretty well and we sent it pretty hard down to Navy Bouy passing a huge number of boats in the process. It gradually got windier as we came into tiri passage and we were sitting on 12-16kts, comfortable but just starting to get a handful. At this stage I was regretting just being in my shorts as there was a bit of water over the deck but the chances of me being able to put any more gear on were slim to none, my boots were full of water anyway. We pulled off a glamour gybe at navy bouy and caught a huge wave surfing down it at 18kts. This leg seemed slightly tighter or it could have been that the breeze was up to 25-30kts and we were well low on course but hauling ass. We could now see Pepe (for the first time since about motuhie passage) and they were just 2 sail reaching, and going a lot slower than us. The waves were really starting to build now and we were regularly surfing up to 18-20kts boatspeed and just loving it, we only did one small skid when I was really trying to push the height, if you don’t know he limits then you are not pushing it hard enough! It was only a minor one and just a quick flap of the kite and we were off again at 18kts. It was magic sailing and we really were flying. After blasting through to leeward of 2 Elliott 1050s, then hard labour at pace we eventually sailed through to leeward of Pepe to take the lead on the water for the first time in the race. Unfortunately we were not going to lay north head with the gennaker up and had to drop the gennaker at about Takapuna and 2 sail reach to the finish, Pepe with its extra 4 ft of waterline slowly overtook us again. We setup the fractional gennaker with the plan to hoist at north head and try to sneak past them but we decided it was probably not worth it, the gun would have only been a moral victory for us anyway as we give Pepe time on handicap so they would have beaten us anyway. We actually went as far as having the tack out on the end of the prod before we pulled the pin on it and decided the safer option was best.

The end result had us 25 seconds behind Pepe 16 minutes ahead of fast company and the next boat almost 40 minutes behind.

Well done to Pepe who again sailed a good race. I think they will be hard to beat in this series now with 2 double line and handicap wins.

I don’t think there was any more we could have done in that race, we sailed well upwind and hiked hard for the whole beat. Put up the big gear and sent it home. No downtime at all and some EPIC rides. The only downside of the day is that we really didn’t have much time for a beer during the race. We made up for it with a rum frenzy on the rattle with the mercenary, cosmic cruise and faster coyote crews.

Thanks to SSANZ for another great day on the water.

Josh

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